January 10, 2015

Folks, it was my great pleasure to join Sujoy Singha and Beth Watkins for Sujoy's "Best of Bollywood" podcast roundup for 2014. Please listen and share, and let us know what you thought was remarkable - for better or worse - about last year's Hindi films.

January 08, 2015

About two-thirds of the way through Govind Nihalani's Ardh satya, a retired rural cop (Amrish Puri) laments the difficulties that his son, Anant Velankar (Om Puri), is having as an urban police officer in Bombay. The senior Velankar paces, distraught and muttering. He taught his son how to conduct an "encounter" without leaving marks that could support brutality charges. And he urged his son not to move to the city - in the countryside, he thinks, it's much easier to work out deals and cover-ups when things do go pear-shaped. In the city, there is too much pressure and too much oversight.

The senior Velankar is himself a violent, abusive man, and the son he raised did not want to be anything like him. Anant wanted to study philosophy, not join the police force. And having joined the force to appease his rageful, controlling father, he wants to do the job well and with integrity. As a young Bombay police inspector, though, Anant's idealism is quickly broken as he learns what the rules of the game that cops and gangsters play really are.

Anant's struggle with the truths and half-truths about the operation of evil in that society form the core of Ardh satya's bleak and sad and riveting study. The film is not merely an exposé of police corruption and misconduct - it's likely that Nihalani's audience would have been all too aware of such happenings and would not have needed them exposed. What makes the film so powerful is what it reveals about the toll these realities take on a human being who wants to rise above them but, being merely human, struggles to find the strength to do so.

Anant's superiors dance to the tune of the local gang boss, Rama Shetty (a chillingly charismatic Sadashiv Amrapurkar), a Bal-Thackeray-like figure who both runs illegal gambling and smuggling operations, and runs for political office. Anant arrests some of Shetty's men, and is appalled to see Shetty have them released with a single phone call. Soon after, Shetty extends an invitation to Anant, offering a sort of deal where each can benefit from the other's position.

Both Amrapurkar and Puri do intense things with their eyes.

Anant refuses, in disbelief and disgust. Still, while he won't make openly corrupt material deals with crime bosses, Anant is no shining Dudley-Doright type; the violent temper he got from his father and a tendency to overdo the brutality in encounters gets him into trouble with his superiors, even in the context of the vicious practices of the Bombay police force. And when Anant does find himself facing discipline, the same shady palm-greasing that thwarts his own attempts to serve justice on Shetty now work to his benefit. The hypocrisy tears him apart.

Niahalani's telling of this bleak tale is deeply effective. With all his anger and flaws, Anant is a startlingly sympathetic character, with an anguished yearning to right his path, brought into sharp focus by his tender relationship with Jyotsna (Smita Patil), a college instructor with whom he shares philosophy and poetry. Jyotsna is Anant's respite from the vicious dark of his job; she seems to ground him in the world he wants to live in. But her hold isn't strong enough as the stresses mount; Anant begins drinking, even as a cautionary tale pops up now and again, in the form of a disgraced and pathetic ex-officer, an alcoholic named Lobo (Naseeruddin Shah), who cannot let go of the fantasy that he will someday get his job back.

Jyotsna observes Anant's increasing distress with a loving but skeptical eye; as he becomes more troubled and erratic, she gives him mamy chances but ultimately chooses to protect herself, rather than get more deeply involved with a man so clearly headed toward tragedy. This is an unusual sort of agency to see in films, where women are generally self-sacrificing and dedicated to shouldering any burden to benefit the men they love. Instead, Jyotsna chooses to liberate herself, and it is both a relief and a heartbreak. Anant too achieves a sort of liberation in the end, consistent with his principles but in a far more tragic mode.

These are just a few of the unflinching elements that make Ardh satya shine though all its hardness and grit. The film is like a police thriller in which the filmi elements have been stripped away, leaving gut punches in place of dishoom-dishoom, and raw feeling in the place of melodrama. In one scene, Anant and his colleagues visit a dank den in which a bar dancer wears an outfit and does moves that wouldn't be out of place in a Helen song. But the sparkly escapism of Helen's songs is drained out of the image; it's monochrome and dark, tinged with a sour kind of dread, and the men leer the way filmi villains do, even the sympathetic Anant. In scenes like this, turning movie tropes on their heads, Ardh satya gets right under the skin.

December 28, 2014

Of all the dreary and pretentious Raj Kapoor movies I've watched, Barsaat has to be the worst – at least it's a solid tie with the unbearable Aag. It's hard to believe that this is the same filmmaker who made the buoyant, kinetic Shree 420, which I adore. Barsaat has none of the elements that make Shree 420 such a delight – a charming hero who undergoes real character growth, a heroine with some will and personality, an uplifting message about something larger than the scope of the auteur's own navel. Barsaat, put simply, is a drag.

Raj Kapoor's character Pran is a self-absorbed, self-important young man. He speaks in what must to him seem poetic proclamations; but they resound as smugly-delivered adolescent expressions of the Byronic ideal. This would be fine if the audience were meant to reject them as such, but these ideas of Pran's are apparently offered in earnest: that love is measured in longing and pain, that love without tears isn't love, that love reaches purity only when it is utterly joyless. Feh.

Barsaat fails because Pran's foil, Gopal (Premnath) is a more richly-drawn and interesting person than Pran. Sure, Gopal is a cad; he plays fast and loose with the love of a country girl (Nimmi), with tragic (if thoroughly predictable) results. But he also banters with Pran and is the only person who seems to see Pran's pompous hot air for what it is, at least until the end, by which time he has adopted Pran's tiresome philosophy. Gopal makes some mistakes in this movie (something Pran never does, of course), but given the choice I'd much rather have a drink with him than with Pran, so insufferably far up his own ass.

Premnath bantering with Raj Kapoor; Nimmi moony over Premnath. There is also a weird interlude featuring KN Singh as an oafish lout who kidnaps Nargis and tries to force her into marriage.

Barsaat fails too because Nargis's character, who loves Pran, is almost as vapid and agencyless as her character in Aag. (At least here, she gets her own name, and doesn't have an entire persona assigned to her by Raj Kapoor's character.) It's bad enough that she falls for Pran's overblown intensity and his grandiose philosophy, but the giggling ingenue is a waste of Nargis's gravity and presence. For the man who discovered her and made a star of her, it seems to have taken Raj Kapoor not a few years to figure out what to do with all Nargis had to offer on screen. Watching Barsaat and Aag, one has the feeling that young Raj Kapoor had never met or talked to an actual woman.

At least there is some impressive cinematography to enjoy.

The only highlights of Barsaat come in a few songs, especially those in the first half hour of the film, like the superb title song in which Cuckoo fronts a troupe of musicians and dancers dressed as Kashmiri villagers.

December 27, 2014

I chose this movie out of Shabana Azmi completism, but what I got turned out to be pretty satisfying masala in its own right. Its backstory is set forth with rare specificity in time; the film opens at the end of World War II, when Indian freedom fighters were operating in exiled cells in east Asia. In this “exotic” setting, a very appealing relationship forms between a delightfully angsty Vinod Khanna and Helen in an unusually non-dancing, non-vamp role.

Fast forward to the present (as masala films do) and you're in pleasingly familiar masala territory: the martyred freedom fighter Vinod Khanna has left an illegitimate son (Danny Denzongpa) in Hong Kong with a distraught Helen, and a legitimate son (also Vinod Khanna) in Bombay with his grave and serious mother (Indrani Mukhejee, who is super-fabulous and intense in this role, and makes me wonder why she's never jumped into my consciousness before, despite the half-dozen or so films I've seen her in). The two young men are, of course, unknown to each other and, of course, on opposite sides of the law - Vinod a proud police inspector, Danny falling in with the smuggling ring that holds Shabana hostage.

No one does man-pain quite like Vinod Khanna.

Highlights include Danny doing kung fu, a very sweet ballad picturized on Helen, and even a taste of filmi-paagal in the form of Shabana Azmi's character's mother, tortured and abused to madness by the villain, Kader Khan (accompanied in this standard-issue villainy ensemble by Ranjeet). There's a pretty cute set of sequences where Danny falls in with a plucky orphan girl called Shabbo; together they engineer some minor cons and become fast friends. Shabana Azmi is as wasted as she ever is in such masala fare, but she does get to wear some super pantsuits and tromp around Darjeeling looking pouty and fabulous. There's really nothing not to like here – an enjoyable bellyful of masala comfort food.

December 22, 2014

My latest column in Outlook India recalls the day I spent on the PK set in 2013. Aamir Khan gave me my first paan, and I ate lunch cooked by Anushka Sharma's mother. A pretty awesome day.

As to the movie itself, now that I have seen it, I don't feel a compulsion to be especially critical. Lots of others have praised its strengths and critiqued its weaknesses, and I'm not sure I have much to add to the general hubbub. It's very sweet; I enjoyed it thoroughly.

Text (c) 2006-2014, Carla Miriam Levy.
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